Full-Time Supervision
|
Restaurants, caterers, and fast food stores, particularly those with meat products, require full-time supervision. The Mashgiach must control access to the cooking area, the meat, and the dishes. Supervision that relies on unscheduled visits is insufficient.
According to the guidelines established by Rabbi Berel Levy, senior rabbinic edministrator of the OK Kashrut, the owner and his family, are never to be the Kosher supervisors of their own establishment. Although a full-time Mashgiach is more expensive and also imposes circumstances that may well cause severe inconvenience, if the Mashgiach arrives late for example, Hashgocha Temidis is nevertheless imperative. The strongest argument for full-time supervision is that even the most staunchly observant Jew faces a difficult test when large sums of money are involved. Kashrus mistakes in a domestic kitchen may compel us to throw out a pot of soup, an inconvenience but not a catastrophe. However, it is simply not fair to expose anyone to the test of having to toss out hundreds of dollars of their own money. Rabbi Yoel Don Levy tells of the day he visited a restaurant that did not have a full-time supervisor and discovered that this establishment, which operated on Shabbos (customers ordered and paid for their meals before Shabbos) would cook foods for the next day after the Kosher supervisor left. Furthermore, the non-Jewish cook would frequently use various non-Kosher ingredients, even adding butter to the meat dishes since this would enhance the taste of the food. Rabbi Levy also recalls the horrible story of a caterer who had to remove half full bottles of wine from all the tables in the middle of a Bar Mitzvah upon discovery that the wine was not Mevushal. Recently, a butcher store in Flatbush, N.Y., owned by a well-known religious Jew, was found to be selling non-Glatt meat. The local supervising agency had followed the lenient policy of supervising only with random spot checks. No one was closely monitoring every piece of meat that came in, and the owner was able to bring in whatever he wanted. Well-known experts in the field of kosher unequivocally agree that any establishment serving meat must have a full-time, independent supervisor. Most kosher agencies have already undertaken this policy, and we call on all agencies that have not done so, to seriously reconsider their policy and provide truly reliable certification. information garnered from this article |
|
